[Development] Is overriding an existing virtual method 'BC' in Qt 4?

[Stephen Kelly]

Hi there,

In

 https://codereview.qt-project.org/#patch,unified,35581,1,/COMMIT_MSG

we have a discussion about whether to reimplement a virtual method (the 
obvious way to fix this bug, as was done in the Qt 5 patch), or to avoid doing 
so.

In this case, code which gets recompiled will get the bug fix, and code that 
does not get recompiled will not get the bug fix.

Do we care about cases like that? Existing compiled code will continue to work 
as before. From the point of view of the dynamic linker, it is BC as there is 
no change to the virtual table size etc (AFAIK).

Do we have a hard policy for this? 'It's fine to add virtual method overrides 
as long as the existing compiled code continues to work without new bugs' 
makes sense, but do we have it written down anywhere authoritive?

Thanks,

-- 
Stephen Kelly <stephen.kelly at kdab.com> | Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
www.kdab.com || Germany +49-30-521325470 || Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-Independent Software Solutions
** Qt Developer Conference: http://qtconference.kdab.com/ **
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